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Leacock Medal should have been Golden - or Maybe Gordon

The Leacock Associates have changed their award-giving process this year (2016), anointing those on a shorter, short list of finalists with special profile

I think this is good.  But I wish they also took the opportunity of this change to also start using gold for the Leacock Medal for Humour instead of silver.

Emanuel Hahn, a sculptor of discs in precious metal, crafted the Leacock medallion in 1947. He had a fondness for silver, given that his fame had come from work on Canada’s canoe-bearing dollar and other silvery coins.

Me with Hahn's original Leacock Medal Cast 
If, however, the Leacock award givers had opted to honour champions with gold or titanium or even  tin, they could have recognized those left on the short list as “silver medalists” and, in effect, as  winners.  As it is, I hear too many outstanding writers cited as someone “who didn’t win” or worse.

My approach would, for example, lighten the male-heavy list of Leacock Medalists with the names of women writers like recent nominees Jane Christmas, Zarqa Nawaz, Patricia Pearson, Susan Juby, Robin Michele Levy, Rupinder Gill, Shari Lapeña, Kathyrn Borel, and Lynn Coady  and other greats like Sandra Shamas, Miriam Toews, Susan Musgrave, Christie Blatchford, Sheree Fitch, and yes, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields.  

Throw in past also-ran males like Roy MacGregor and Douglas Coupland, you would elevate the Leacock Medal by association and, at the same time, show how rich our national humour writing base really is.

One of Charlie's Three Finalists
But if I had only one "Runner Up Silver Leacock Medal" to hand out, it would go to a writer who was shorted on the short list three (3) times. Charles Gordon.

Ok, I am partial to him, in part, because he devoted much of his humorous life to my town’s daily paper the Ottawa Citizen.  He also polished the pages of MacLean’s magazine and other renowned publications as well as producing that string of Leacock Medal short list books.

For over forty-years, Charley has been making Canadians smile, laugh, and think.

A Great Analysis of Sarah Binks
I think it’s the “think” part that impresses me most about Charles Gordon whose thoughtful writings include the Afterword to the New Canadian Edition of Sarah Binks.

“Man, if I could write like that about the other Leacock winners, my book would rock,” I thought.

About a year ago, Charley and I shared bacon and eggs under the pink sign at Kristy’s Restaurant on Richmond Road in Westboro. 

He was as just as funny, modest, and generous as his many admirers claim, and he struck me with his ability to turn the conversation away from his own works and onto those of others.  One of those others was his sister Alison, a two-time shortlisted and should-have been a silver medalist Leacock nominee and a pioneering woman sports reporter.   She passed away in 2015, and Charley had just returned from her memorial service when we made contact.

Of the winning Leacock Medalists, Charley said he liked fellow journalist George Bain.

“I first started following Bain when I was in university in the late 50s, and he was writing as Washington correspondent for the Globe and Mail,” Charles Gordon told me. “His political humour was informed by a real grasp of what was going on – not the unsual stuff about politicians being stupid or corrupt – and he had a playfulness in his use of words and a self-deprecating tone - like in his book I’ve been Around and Around and Around and Around.”

George Bain wrote lots of books and political columns, many humorous.  But he won the Leacock Medal for a parody of a children’s book of verses with instructions for their parents, Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud by Young Parents of Old Children.

“It was innovative, but others have done similar things,” Charley said. “I recall Allen Abel’s funny Christmas carols in the Globe were like that.”
 1986 - Finalist

In response to my probing on the humour-writing craft, Gordon said that you have to start by knowing yourself.

“You can’t write rough-edged satire if you are not rough-edged yourself,” he said. “And you shouldn’t be trying to suck up to your readers – the best joke is one the reader has to figure out for him or herself.”

Charley added that he believed you can only learn by doing, reading carefully, trying to figure out what makes you laugh and why, and then trying to copy it.

This insight left me cheered as it was kind of what I tried to do with my book.  

It also made me more convinced than ever that the Leacock Associates should have used gold not silver.
DBD
January 2016

Leacock Medalists, a Canadian Baby, and the Bard's Bookshop

In Stratford-Upon-Avon, on the day before we began our walk to Oxford in 2015, we dropped into a unique book store, a place that provides the perfect launch point for the walk down Shakespeare’s Way.   

The Shakespeare Hospice Book Shop sits on Rother Street a couple of blocks from the Virginia Inn, our first B&B, making it an easy first stop on our tour around town. 

Visiting the shop allowed me to indulge in a favourite pastime. For me, a student of comic-tragic literature and developing writer, the old books, CDs, maps, and material about and by the Bard linked the walk to my personal interests and to my most recent project, which was fuelled by many visits to used bookstores in Canada.

As its name announces, the bookstore raises funds for the Hospice, a charity that, among other things, maintains a residential home for those with chronic disability or terminal disease. The Hospice volunteers fundraise through many instruments including a store that sells second hand items of all kinds.  So many people in this highly literate community donated used books that a separate, spinoff store had to be created for this purpose alone. 

We dropped by the book shop just after opening time. 

It was already busy, yet the staff was surprisingly enthusiastic about my self-serving donation of my books on the Leacock Medal and took time to talk about them. 

The gesture thus allowed me to support the charity and to tell myself that my writing would be sold alongside the works of Shakespeare in the Bard’s home town.  But this is not the reason for using this store as a starting point for the walk.  The genuine and nobler one comes from the Shakespeare’s Way Association which actively encourages people like us to give meaning to their walks by using them as fundraisers for the Hospice. 

 The Association also passes all profits to the same charity, and given how much we benefited from those publications over the following week, we were pleased to make a donation at the end of what the Association calls a “journey of the imagination.”

Of course, the store is merely the touchstone within the frame, which is the town of Shakespeare’s birth and burial.  Like all visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon, we logged a few kilometres for our journey before leaving town.

In the well- trodden tourist itinerary, we visited Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, a pub, Holy Trinity Church, a tea room, Mary Arden’s farm, another pub.  We even clocked a few extra metres walking by the Bard’s birthplace and home twice before noticing the bush covered panel for the entrance of the Shakespeare centre.  Inside, our backpack flag invited a beaming account of the 2014 visit to the centre by another Canadian, the then one-month-old Suzana Kirk.   Her parents came to Stratford-upon-Avon for her birth and baptism in Holy Trinity Church.




A Curse - discourages DNA Testing
Her father, originally from British Columbia, is directly related to Shakespeare's sister.  Unless DNA testing someday reveals illegitimate descendants of the Bard’s stops along Shakespeare’s Way, the little Canadian Suzana, Shakespeare’s 14th great-niece, remains a vital continuation of the line.




We missed the tour of the Royal Shakespeare Company theatres, and because the RSC was not performing a Shakespearean work, we skipped the play settling instead for some souvenirs.

I bought a mug with a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to encourage Michele, my own little Canadian, in the 100 kilometre walk ahead of us
.

Ian Ferguson's Mom


I think Ian Ferguson's mom should get an Honorary Leacock Medal for Humour.

The thought has probably crossed many minds because this woman produced and reared the winners of four (4) Leacock Medals.  Ian won the award in 2004 (Village of the Small Houses), and his younger brother Will picked up Medals in 2002 (Happiness/Generica), 2005 (Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw), and 2010 (Beyond Belfast).  Ian and Will, who have other creative  siblings, combined their inherited (or nurtured) humour in the immensely popular How to Be a Canadian.


The mother of all these Fergusons also warrants recognition as the only person to be featured in two Leacock Medal books.  She was celebrated with a chapter in Beauty Tips as well as throughout Ian’s book on his childhood in Fort Vermilion.   


But I am advancing the woman for an Honorary Medal because of her direct contribution to the writing of one of those books.


Stone's Throw Restaurant 
Ian Ferguson agreed to meet with me when I was in Victoria last May.  Over piles of comfort food at Stone's Throw restaurant on Johnson Street, Ian told me about the writing of his book, how it got its title, and how his mother shaped the final product. The book is about growing up next to a reserve in a remote, frozen town in Northern Alberta. 

Round the Corner at Russell Books - Victoria 

The pages this self-labelled “memoir of sorts” talks of times without indoor plumbing, consistent heat and electricity.  But Ian told me that his first draft included stories of even rougher days.


“Before publishing it, I gave the manuscript to my mom and others in my family to read over and check,” he said. “I expected her to come back with a few notes and edits, but she gave me her copy with a whole chapter and more struck out with a big line across the pages – she said I could share those stories after she was gone.”


Ian thought those passages made his mom look heroic and merely emphasized the challenges in bringing up her brood.  But he agreed and took them out.


“I’ve been criticized by some literary purists and pompous students for doing that,” Ian Ferguson said in a snorting way. “Yeah, right, like I’m  going to trade my mother’s feelings for some literary standard or book.”

Contrary to what some critics might say, I think, however, that Ian’s mother might have improved the book.  

I like it because it told the story of a rugged childhood,   in a sort of neutral, low-key Canadian way.  It didn’t go for over-the-top slapstick laughs nor did it, in my mind, overplay the hard times in a cliché that might have suggested victimhood.  Maybe, the book would have edged closer to the latter literary trap had those mother-edited passages been left in.

Like I said in my original review of the book, I liked it, in part, for the things that were not said, and it sounds like this is due to the woman who I suggest should get an Honorary Leacock Medal.


DBD
January 2016



1989 - Winter Tulips by Joe Kertes

Lesson 42:  Writing of young love

Excerpt from my book: "Approaching Guelph, Ontario from the south, the road rises a bit and then slopes down just before entering the town.  The last time I drove that stretch, in June 2003, a dark wave hit my rent-a-car.  It washed over me, seeped into my head, and dampened the corners of my eyes.  I drove past the university campus and had to turn back.   My son, with ear buds running into a CD player, noticed nothing, yawned, and kept looking out the window.  The gloomy wave carried a memory that I had suppressed for decades: the break-up with my university girlfriend and her death ... "

In my book, I started my lesson/review of Winter Tulips, the 1989 Leacock Medal winner by Joe Kertes, by recalling this road trip with my son because it ran through university-days memories and my personal experience with the kind of young love celebrated in this novel.  Well, not exactly.  Winter Tulips tells a happier story, and yet it triggered complex recollections that once again surprised me with the strange associations we make to the things we find humorous.

Tulips follows Ben Beck, a viola playing student who moves from his home in Jewish Montreal to study at the University of Toronto.  He lives above a Greek Restaurant, where he hangs out and makes friends with the owner, his wife, his son, and particularly his daughter Diane.  The book draws on the author’s own life and love for his Greek wife Helen, and in the few light interactions I’ve had with Joe Kertes, now the Dean of Creative and Performing Arts at Humber College in Toronto, it seemed clear that he is and has always been that “nice” guy in the story. 
The book’s strength is the celebration of second generation Canadians who set aside the demarcations of their cultures, build relationships, and find love. For this reason, Kertes’ book was popular in Canadian schools as a stimulus to multiculturalism conversations and constitutes a bit of a Leacock Medal landmark.

Thinking about my own, more edgy Winter Tulips experience brought home both the
possibilities and challenges in finding humour in niceness and that first love.
For a review copy of my book:  canushumorous@gmail.com